Avi Arya walks through digital marketing strategies for travel agents, tour operators, and OTAs. He covers market segmentation, customer behavior, and how to build online presence and sales through content marketing.
So now coming back to something little more serious. This video I made specially for my travel agent friends, for my tour operator friends, and for my OTA friends. Lot of online travel companies coming out of Oman, coming out of Bangkok, coming out of Turkey, coming out of Doha that we have been working with at Internet Moguls, which is the company where I am the CEO and a lot of my friends who have travel agencies because they 10 years back, I used to be a travel agent myself and I used to be a tour operator. It was a really amazing time of my life. We got 19 awards in the five years of running that company. We were number one among 4,500 agents in India. And we, you know, we did everything which was absolutely perfect at that point in time to win all these awards and all of that great time of my life. I traveled so much, I met a lot of people. And I'm talking about 10 years back when I was running this travel company. I was about 27 years old at that time. And we were sending video replies. The Internet was not very fast. For every query that came to us, we had a studio. I would actually come in front of the camera and reply to every itinerary with a video explaining how they should travel and addressing all their queries. You can imagine this is not happening even today. You can imagine just by following video replies in today's environment, where it's much more easier to set up a studio in house, in your office, your conversion ratio for those queries will skyrocket. I hope that point helps. I didn't tell anybody 10 years back because I was maybe in the business and I thought everybody was competition. Today, when I'm helping travel companies, tour operators, OTAs in almost 25 countries become successful on the Internet, this is one idea I'm sure will help you guys do amazing business. Now, everybody can have a different show structure, you can have a different way of replying to people, but do that videos will help get more engagement and more conversions. Now, how does a travel agent, a tour operator and OTA get successful on the Internet? Now, in the hotel section of my videos, We've spoken about 361 and I bring you back to 361 of travel marketing, tour operator marketing. You need to know where all your business is coming from. Now, we also spoke about the six circles of hotel marketing. And here I want to bring your attention back to the six circles of travel agent marketing, of tour operators marketing, and marketing in ota. How do you do that? Circle number one, which are your top six Domestic geographies. So if you're a tour operator in say Dubai, which are the six geographies that in and around UAE that you get business from? If you're a tour operator in Dubai, which are the six international geographies that you get business from? Uk, Germany, Russia. The Russian market is slowed down, but yet maybe Russia, India becoming a huge market for Dubai tour operators. China again, nobody can miss China, maybe some parts of America. So six geographies. So those are the two circles. The third circle, when are these geographies coming? When are the Indians coming to Dubai? When are the Canadians coming to Dubai? When are the Spanish coming to Dubai? When are people from the UAE countries coming to Dubai? That's the third circle. The fourth circle is to see when are they booking. The Indian is booking maybe just two weeks or five days in advance. A guy from China are booking two months in advance. The American might be booking six months in advance. So everybody has a very different booking pattern. So look at the booking pattern to ensure that you can run the right remarketing, retargeting PPC ads on social media, Google, Facebook, everywhere. Now the fifth circle being what do they want, you know, as value conscious travelers, the Indian might just want a great deal, all inclusive breakfast and airport transfer. All of that within the hotel, price built in. So you know that this is how I need to target an Indian customer. The Chinese people might be coming with a seven day tour and they want all inclusive breakfast, lunch and dinner. They want to have it at the hotel, so they want an all inclusive, no hassle trip and they want everything together. American might want three days here, two days in your other hotel and a little bit of cycling thrown in. And airport transfer. They say they'll manage the road, they come by the bus. American might be a completely different traveler. And then the sixth and the final circle is how to wrap all of these things up in one plan. Now at Internet Moguls, this is a service that we have been delivering to travel agents, tour operators, OTAs in 25 countries over the last 10 years. Stems from the experience that I had of running one of India's most successful travel companies. Running one of India's most successful tour operating companies, private company, privately held, run by the family, but did extremely well. And then from my role from being a travel agent, tour operator, hotelier, now that I'm the CEO of Internet Mogul, where we are almost 150 moguls in three offices working with travel agents across the world, I see the travel industry, the OT industry, the Meta search industry, the aggregator industry, the travel app industry from a very different perspective and therefore we've been able to bring that success to over 400 clients in the last few years. So if you are a client talking to any of our teams or any of my Internet moguls, or if you are somebody who wants to get in touch with me directly, asking me or asking any of our moguls how to successfully market your travel company, your ota, your tour operating business, you could be a niche person, you could be just selling farm tours in Canada, or you could be somebody who's selling an Australian tour to somebody only in Turkey because you know you're selling something which Turkish people like and is found only in Australia. Or you could be somebody who's trying to become the next Expedia or the next Make My Trip or the next OTA giant in a smaller country place like Doha, or a smaller place like Turkey. But want to see and learn from the mistakes and the successes of the large store operators. Our company, me, myself, we work with all the large companies across the world, all the large OTAs, all the largest, the large travel company, we've learned from their successes, we work very closely with them as affiliates running multi million dollar programs. And we've also continued to work with all the new unicorns coming into the industry. So with our experience and with my team's support, we will be able to give you a 100% award winning plan which will help you. And if you want us to execute that strategy, we'll be more than happy to execute that strategy for you as well. So I made this a part of the Askavi Arya show, but I'm hoping that this video reaches out to all people in the travel fraternity to say that here is the company, here is the team of 150 people who have dedicated themselves from the past life of being, from the travel community, from being part of where you are. So many tourism boards come to us and we help them with their content strategies. We are here to help the travel community understand, decode the ever changing world, the ever changing landscape of digital marketing, of Internet marketing. Once you think you mastered it, there's another platform. Now how do you market yourself on that other platform? We are here to learn, to evolve with you, train you, guide you, execute for you and get the results for you. Just don't forget, content is king. So all you tour operators, all your OTA, all you OTAs out there watching this show, anybody working for any of these companies or, or you know, tourism board, you want to you know, you want to promote Philippines, you want to promote Sydney, you want to promote Morocco. Your content is king. We've got a team of almost 27 photographers based in three different locations where we have offices who have actually taken some really, really good pictures. They travel across the world and they create Instagram content. We have focused and specialized in delivering to you social media content. Content that you can use on your channels to get more traffic, more backlinks, more people coming in and eventually making your business work, which is to sell the travel experience that you have. Bringing your customer to your website, converting in and putting their dollars, putting those dollars into your accounts. I hope this video was useful. Please write in to us, comment on this section below. Reach out to the moguls. Help us make great strategy for your travel business. Thank you very much for watching this video.
With my conversation and my interaction with Abhijit, I did realize that he is one of the leaders and the pioneers in this space. The amount of input which we get from Internet Mughals to ensure that we are in the right direction is quite commendable. We feel that, yes, the amount of interaction we have with the Internet Moogles team helps us to maybe change and look at things a little differently so that we are able to communicate with the customer and reach out to the customer in a much more effective way.
Internet Moogles was one of the first ones to come up to help people grow their businesses through social media and through digital networks. And Avijit, of course, whom I have known from his previous life in the tourism business, he was one of the innovators of this, this whole platform. So I think we didn't think we couldn't think of anyone better than Avijit to help us in our endeavors to, you know, go to get across on the social media.
Once I had made a query, you know, with Internet Mughals, this is way before I knew them about how to do something in search engine optimization. And what I liked was Avjeet himself took the effort of coming here, meeting me and the one hour chat we spent over a cup of coffee was highly enlightening. It opened us up into different levels of thinking as to what needs to be done in digital marketing and how ancient we were in the technologies we were using. So the journey has been great. They've been thorough professionals and they've been of great help to getting us where we are.
